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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

There is also, in the West, rapidly increasing housing demand caused by mass immigration. This also has the double effect of reducing wages.

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For this to be true, you would expect to see rapid population growth. There aren't any Western countries with undue population growth levels - the immigrants are brought in to make up the numbers for the millions of babies that aren't being made.

As is often the case in these discussions, my home country is forgotten.

> Canada's population is currently growing at a record-setting pace. In 2022, the number of Canadians rose by 1,050,110. This marks the first time in Canadian history that our population grew by over 1 million people in a single year, and the highest annual population growth rate (+2.7%) on record since 1957 (+3.3%).

https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/subjects-start/population_and_d...

Canada is also going through its worst affordability crisis in recent memory. I'm happy to have gotten out, but as anyone living there now can tell you, things have gotten very bad, very quickly.

I'm actually an immigrant in Canada, so part of the problem!

BUT: I look around me and I see oodles of space and very little new building going on. 2.7% growth should not be impossible to deal with.

When I first moved to Toronto, I was shocked to discover that there are not only actual houses in the downtown area, but entire zero-rise neighbourhoods.

I now live in Calgary, which is where half of Ontario is moving, and according to this [0] we had a "record" new housing starts last year of 5700 houses and 7700 apartments in Calgary. We probably need closer to 57000 and 77000; we have the financial system to support that, and we have enough room for it. Finding that many tradespeople might be a challenge, but we aren't even trying.

[0] - https://calgaryherald.com/business/local-business/calgary-ho....

Isn't Alberta real estate historically boom and bust?

It’s rather rich to be invited to a party and point out that if the hosts had used their resources better, there’d be enough chairs and food for everyone.

I wasn’t invited to the party, I was invited to move in to the house; and now I’m getting blamed for the lack of chairs when really we have enough room and money to literally install a nice comfy chair for every human on the planet.

That explains Canada’s housing crisis, but not America’s or much of Europe’s. I guess immigration makes it especially worse in Canada, but without immigration driving growth, it would still probably be bad.

The issue elsewhere is not country-wide net population change, it's people moving into just a few cities. So there is plenty of cheap housing where few people want to live

500k - 750k per year in the UK currently.

Here in Norway the primary driver of the housing crisis is that people move from the countryside to larger cities, while hardly anyone does the reverse.

Ironically there's a shortage in the countryside as well, as many of those that move or inherit (ie kids moved) don't sell due to low prices, opting to keep it as a summer home.

And since prices are low it's difficult to get a loan, since sales price is often below the cost of building.

Average wages have never gone down since WW2 (stats are readily available), although immigration may be a factor in dampening the growth rate. For most people on HN, everything before WW2 is before your lifetime.

"Average real-terms pay in Britain fell at among the fastest rates for more than two decades at the end of 2022, as public sector pay deals continue to fall behind the private sector during the cost of living crisis.

The Office for National Statistics said wages in real terms declined by 2.6% in the three months to November, among the largest falls in growth since comparable records began in 2001."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/17/real-terms-...

My comment was alluding to America. UK's a whole different ballgame.

I don't know how immigration work in US but in Europe, most immigrants live on welfare with housing given by governments.

People think that, but it’s not true. The majority is migrant workers, and a substantial portion of them do white collar jobs.

This is a take that would take serious evidence to convince me of. Population growth rates been declining in every western country to the point where, even with immigration, many are below replacement.

"The UK population at mid-year 2021 was estimated to be 67.0 million, an increase of 3.7 million (5.9%) on the population in mid-2011."

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

> mass immigration.

What are the statistics?

745,000 people in the UK in 2022,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-67506641

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